skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Check out the map of the Philippine startup community
It's an obstacle because it saps your confidence.

I have in my life never been what you'd call a pentathlete and am in my old age tending towards a more sitcom-dad appearance (modulo the torn-up clothes, 4 day stubble, and unkempt hair). I own recruiting for an 7+ y/o company (that I cofounded) that is significantly larger than the median YC company; I'm also one of 4 key sales team members. I've had those roles since the company started; I also recruited our President. There's no correlation I can observe between athleticism and sales/recruiting success.

I've also spent years of my life doing enterprise sales (as a product manager riding along with account managers to F-500 accounts). I may in this capacity have accumulated more direct sales experience than you have. Let me set you straight on something right away: a demonstrable ability for eating steak while receiving a lap dance is far more predictive of sales ability than one's ability to do a pull-up. The salespeople who could finish a marathon did not as a rule outperform the salespeople who would have felt at home eating onion cheeseburgers at 9AM on the mortgage desk at Salomon in 1987.

There is a clear and obvious correlation between selling ability and confidence. Every successful salesperson (or recruiting or, probably, fundraiser) I've known could walk into a room, look you in the eye, and confidently ask for the sale. Confident people can take command of a room; they sieze the channel and shut off the normal conversational flow control signals that sales targets rely on to blow people off. They do it without trying and often without the target even noticing it. It's about confidence and, to an extent, about shamelessness and an ability to deal with rejection.

Culturally --- perhaps for good reasons given the health issues involved --- people with appearance handicaps are conditioned to be deferential instead of confident, and to fear rejection, probably because they face it in life situations where other people never even have to think about rejection. But apart from body odor and wildly inappropriate dress, physical appearance isn't so much a direct obstacle as it is a handicap to developing confidence.

So I recommend that the reader ignore the comment I'm replying to. "Hitting the gym" is, empirically, not going to get you (a) thinner any time soon (though it will make you healthier and, if you're me, drastically reduce your blood pressure) or (b) funded. Take a shower and stop giving a shit what people think about your appearance.
> Litepanels may ban all LED lights from the market

.. all LED lights used for film/video/photography, not for home lighting, electronics, etc. etc. Still bad, but title should be changed.

More on topic: No need to weaken the argument by listing all the components of the "invention" that Litepanels didn't come up with themselves. We all stand on the shoulders of giants; the important question is whether your particular combination/improvement of existing things is novel and non-obvious. This clearly violates the non-obvious clause.

This Initial Determination lists the patents and claims in question: http://www.itcblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/idnoticein...

Here's one of the patents in question:
http://www.google.com/patents/US7972022

Devices infringing on claims 1 and 57-60 are essentially "LED lights, on a stand, hooked up to a camera, with a couple dials for color temperature and brightness." Yikes.
Isn't FK determined almost completely by sentence length? That is what I recall from messing with MS Word docs in high school.
I doubt all of them are sociopaths. Most of them probably are just good at rationalizing to themselves why it is not wrong. Maybe the victims deserve it, maybe they need the money and will just scam one or two more before they quit, etc.
Perhaps I'm reading too much into it, but the name sounds too much like "Get Laid" for my tastes...

The substitution of "maid" doesn't help.
Work/life balance? If I worked at Tesla I'd have a very hard time going home in the evening. I think exciting companies attract people who just keep going that extra mile.

Getting out of work at 5pm kind of defeats the purpose of working at a company like Tesla.
I used to have an account on FB but I closed it and it's unlikely I'm going back.
I did create a company page.
I'm on Twitter and I'm giving G+ another go for the third time.
iCloud looks interesting and could be a major threat to FB because I set up a bunch of pages for family just so they could see their grandchildren.
They're on FB for no other reason so iCloud definitely has some potential there.
I'm also more engaged with the Twitter ads than I ever was with the ads on FB, those ads never interested me. I fully expect FB to copy Twitter's ad model.
I have no idea about NYC rates, but in San Francisco my wife did a lot of searching and screening and we ended up paying $30/hr. That was, I think, the cheapest or nearly cheapest option. And that's before tip. We keep it simple and just pay $100 for her 3 hours every 2 weeks.
@Both,
That has been my point exactly. All of this "my life is worse or better than before/my-ancestors" is context/situation/location dependent to a very large extent. Same goes for jacquesm expert advice on "you can pick the projects that are fun".
Binomial distribution mumble mumble logarithm of page count mumble.
If I'm not mistaken, you buy ads on a cost-per-click or a cost-per-thousand-views basis. In other words, you only pay when people see or click your ad. You also choose exactly what audience you'd like to target on FB -- very few companies are rich enough and broad enough that they want to target the entire FB userbase.

Long-story short, Facebook's total monthly active user count is largely irrelevant to individuals purchasing ads.
From what I gather I think that they are building some sort of visual tool for the easy munging of large data files (ie. converting semi/un structured data into some sort of structured form).

I would assume it would be some sort of GUI that captures the power and expressiveness of Perl in an easy-to-use interface.

Pretty curious on how they plan on doing that, since the problem is very fuzzy and can mean different things to different people.

(With their pedigree, I think the worst that can happen to them is an 'acq-hire'. Not a bad worst-case scenario ;)
C.R.U.S.H. it with culture
Url: http://www.startuphurdles.com
Twitter: @startuphurdles
Post: http://startuphurdles.wordpress.com/2012/10/03/c-r-u-s-h-it-with-culture/

Startup Hurdles is designed to be a fresh, action-promoting view of the world of entrepreneurship.

Startup Hurdles will be an interactive blog filled with stories told from a diverse range of perspectives including experienced serial entrepreneurs, university professors, product managers and sales engineers, all from leading institutions and venture-backed startups. An eventual archive will include stories of successful business building, lessons from failed ventures, and the step-by-step processes involved in idea validation, product development and revenue generation.

A specific goal of Hurdles will be to supplement stories of startup building with actionable toolsets and data that can be leveraged in the actual business-building process by new founders. Examples include open-source worksheets and flowcharts that budding entrepreneurs will be able to use to perform an analysis on their own value propositions. Teachings of startup gurus such as Steve Blank and Paul Graham will be referenced along with actual anecdotal tales of successful and failed ventures and the strategies that facilitate them.

Finally, there will be a healthy dose of edginess injected into our discussion, designed to enlighten and make more personable the sometimes dense and daunting path that an entrepreneur must face in the early stages of business building. Coupled with actionable and proven entrepreneurship tools and advice, Startup Hurdles will become a known force in the startup blog community and will have a sizable impact on new business building in this next phase of the technology startup boom.

- Team @ Startup Hurdles
The problem with this essay is that, if its claims are true, Litepanels can't possibly prevail in court, so there's no reason to respond to a grass-roots funding appeal.

The essay tries to make Litepanels' legal maneuvers sound like a realistic legal threat to monopolize the LED lighting business. But it then explains that there's plenty of prior art and no basis for Litepanels' claiming patent rights over the manufacture and sale of LED products.

Only one of the above claims can be true.

Also there are some very big players in the LED field, with potentially billions of dollars at stake. This isn't exactly the scenario in which a grass-roots action committee is either the appropriate response, or likely to make any difference.

Also, the essay needs some fact checking:

> Furthermore patents are legally only given to those that create something new that someone skilled in the art would not think of.

Although once true, at present this is false -- very, highly, extremely false. In fact, things have gotten to the point where (at least in the US) patents are issued with little or no prior-art checking, on the assumption that the patent is nothing more than a license to sue, with the expectation that the courts will sort out the issues.

And worse (or better, depending on your tastes), just over the horizon is an explicit Patent Office rule change that will grant a patent to the first filer, regardless of whether or not that person has any connection to the creation of the idea being patented:

"USPTO Publishes Proposed Rules Governing First-Inventor-to-File":

http://www.uspto.gov/news/pr/2012/12-44.jsp

Finally, the headline is flat wrong: "Litepanels may ban all LED lights from the market"

The headline (which isn't from the linked article, but from the poster) wrong in these ways:

* Litepanels can't do any such thing -- that power rests with the courts.

* Litepanels seems to be claiming a proprietary interest in LEDs used on photography, not (as one example) TV sets.

* Finally, Litepanels doesn't want to ban LED sales -- they want to hold the business hostage.

I can't repeat this often enough: when you submit an article, do not write your own headline, because you will get it wrong. Copy the original headline.
Street View is amazing, but it's currently not available in my country (Uruguay) nor neighbouring Argentina, and it's not available in any region of Brazil that I've visited (I hear it's now available in Sao Paulo and Rio).
Let's compare git to SVN.

With SVN your only real option is to commit something that is working, right? If you commit something broken to SVN then you will likely get yelled at.

With git, you can make a few changes, then think "hmm that might not be the best way to fix it" do a commit and then rip out everything you just did and do it a different way.

Or maybe you Added some instrumentation for debugging the problem, committed, then fixed the problem, committed, then removed the instrumentation.

In both cases git has let you save off information that you might need during the bugfix process, but ultimately isn't needed in the final history. With SVN, you likely wouldn't check in those intermediate steps so the final history in SVN would be a single commit of "Fix bug foo"

Is there any need for everyone to have these intermediate commits in their history? I guess that's a matter of taste. I think the main thought is that rebases improve the signal-to-noise ratio of the changelog.
I almost forgot about this: back when MySpace was king, the user profile page was something to the effect of MySpace.com/profile=0022447

I was trying to judge active users so I used a script to visit each profile I'd URL and check the "last logged in" date that was a part of everyone's default profile.

(this was 2006 or 2007 so I'm fuzzy on exacts) the MAU was around 49% of what MySpace was claiming at th time. So many accounts hadn't logged in in at least 6 months.

I don't have he data files any longer, but I was using it to plot the actives...
The comparison to judges would be a fair comparison if both parties paid 50% of the judge's salary, and both parties had to agree on which judge to use. Arbitrators are simply not chosen and paid for by the corporations. The way it is typically done is that one arbitrator is agreed upon by both parties (negating any implications of foul play), or each party chooses one and those two arbitrators choose a third.

I think it was mentioned elsewhere that contracts that are both (A) between parties of vastly disparate power, e.g. Microsoft's EULA and the average Xbox gamer; and (B) "take it or leave it" style contracts have been ruled on at least one occasion to be untenable.

Understanding this is not usually the case in the US, I'd rather have a legal system that seemed unfair unless you researched the details than one tried to seem fair from the outside at the risk of being unfair to specific groups.
My version of "values software" is that it be mission-critical. If it breaks, we're going to be chatting at 2 AM and testing a patch at 3, because we'd lose vast sums of money or customers by waiting until after breakfast. I met my favorite manager turning around a shop like this.

Most software is utter garbage because everyone knows better than to actually rely on it and nothing bad happens to incompetent people maintaining it.
Every baseball team has a bench. The unsung hero that is the difference between start-up success and failure is often a family member, friend, or junior helper who keeps the caffeine and food and goodies stocked, has the temerity to send people home when they're so exhausted they're no longer helpful, and last but not least, can occasionally talk some sense into the SuperFounder. Or at least makes sure there is a long comfy couch.
she's had a touch screen device for a few years now, something called a LeapPad which is designed for children. I think soon though that'll get passed down to my youngest who's currently 2, and she can have a cheap tablet of some kind as she's quite clumsy so wouldn't trust her with anything like an iPad!
Good perspective. Always appreciated. :-)
In my experience, git is more complex than svn, but not needlessly so. In any sufficiently long-running project, I've wanted features that git has and svn doesn't.
As molmalo said, they used to license Nokia's maps:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4611625
Well, for one, Feedburner enables PubSubHubBub support, which is pretty key for RSS-centric infrastructure.
haha nice post!

can someone call me like this?

i got windows xp only in a VM :D
I'm all for designers learning a bit of the technical background behind colors on the web, but this article is full of technical inaccuracies, misconceptions, and misleading comparisons.

"Tens place"?
"24-bit color" ignores alpha and color palettes
"# means 'This is a hex number'": No, it means a web color expressed as 3 hex numbers.

Plus, I know it looks better to make your colors less saturated, but when you are demonstrating starting from #ff0000 and adding other colors, why not actually display #ff0000 instead of #e93f32?

Finally, spellcheck.
After being inspired by a Team Lead in my office, 2 years into my career as a software engineer, I chose to focus all of my efforts onto Programming. The main reason it seemed attractive than any other option was that I liked the feeling of having found a solution to a seemingly hard puzzle or a challenge. The small victories. But of course now the reasons include the prospect of creating something of value for which I could get paid passively. Thanks to hacker news! And yes, I like it and don't see myself doing any other thing that programming!
FTC announces international crack down on bogus support call scam
Bloggers are typically interested in:

- Knowing how many RSS subscribers they have.

- An easy way to offer email subscriptions (off by default with FeedBurner, but available on the Publish tab).

- Offloading RSS traffic to another server.

- Having a "portable" feed address. (If they change their domain or URL structure, they won't lose subscribers because they can just adjust the source feed in the feed service without affecting the public feed URL.)

MailChimp, Aweber, and the rest have replaced FeedBurner for email subscriptions for many because they offer more control over the HTML template, help build lists for other marketing efforts, and are generally better set up to guarantee delivery of email and report on opens and clickthrough rates.

That leaves feed count, traffic distribution, and portable feed addresses (plus whatever else you can come up with). I think there's potential for another service to cover these things because there are so few alternatives to FeedBurner. I'm not convinced that people would pay for it, though, but a free tier might encourage a few to give it a shot.
Carol Bartz on the Yahoo Board That Fired Her and Advice for Marissa Mayer
"Fat" says that rules are "the enemies of good JavaScript." That is what I'm arguing against, not occasionally writing something a given way just because that's how you like to code.
Means to 'gently' measure cubit without destroying superposition
JSONburner to eliminate complex XML parsing of RSS
http://jsonburner.herokuapp.com/source?feed=http://news.ycombinator.com/rss
Thinking in the way you'd have to think to ask this question is a huge problem in terms of getting investors. Hustlers don't step on a scale in the morning, look at the number, and then tell themselves "huh, I'd better cut out carbs and spend 6 months at the gym before closing my next sale". They just get the fuck out there and close the sale.

If you want to use entrepreneurship as a forcing function to make progress with weight loss, good on you; your health is almost certainly more important than your short-term business success.

But don't kid yourself about how the market works. If you can generate value and communicate it to clients, customers, and investors, the market will find a number to attach to that value. If you can't, even if you can run a 3.5 hour marathon, you aren't going to get a number to work with. The world is full of fit "business cofounders" who can't sell a fucking thing.

This question is just a way of talking yourself out of taking an honest shot.
I actually believe your interpretation of Big Data is one that has evolved from the original buzz word. The origin of the term is hard to find from what I've researched, but in general it's use refers to large data sets originally, not the analysis. Nowadays analysis is becoming the norm. If anything, maybe this article is behind in that notion! However, I don't know if I agree the buzz word will disappear.
I wouldn't put it past gliese1337. I turned 24 yesterday, and I can honestly tell clients that I've been programming professionally for over a decade. (Obviously, my abilities/standards have changed since then, and so have my rates... hopefully that trend will continue!)
I was onboard until I saw the Comic Sans font, that's where they lost me.
Came across this app:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.darkgadget...

And this looks promising too (more like Cargo Bot)
http://sourceforge.net/projects/andmaz/
He could need it to pay out people, to receive payments from ad networks/partners, etc. I know I definitely need it to pay contractors who live in Asia or Europe and only have Paypal (or otherwise is easier than doing a bank wire).
Whilst I did use Feedburner, I jumped ship as soon as I heard they were shutting off the API. The only thing that I used Feedburner was for the subscriber count, but I've now switched the URLs around on my blog and added a little IP based tracker that more or less gives me the count.

I don't know if I just didn't 'get' Feedburner, but the only appeal for me was the subscriber count, was there any other key features that your own RSS feed cant be modified to do?
Trying to figure out Stripe, which apparently is easy, but not for me.
I remember reading something regarding feeds and Google. Basically in terms of numbers, they just don't feel that anyone users it. Hence why it's unavailable on Chrome. It's a shame. Feeds can be really useful. Though I'll admit they're a niche market.
Ha Ha! lol :))
Show HN: Fatnest, easy collaborative tweeting
I don't really have a problem with them collecting on their debts, but what bothers me about this is that if the situation had turned violent or otherwise required diplomacy, the US gov't would have been responsible for stepping in. i.e., taxpayers would have been on the hook for getting these goofballs out of hot water for their fanciful repo operation.
You don't need to have more views or clicks. If you claim you have 2 or 3x the number of monthlies, you charge more per click or view. You'll attract more advertisers to your site which further drives up the cost of each advertisement.

In this way, inflating monthlies has a direct effect on ad revenue.
Just to balance out all the negative commentary about Indian education (which I'm not discounting by any means), I would like to offer my experience as a college student in one of India's premier engineering colleges (hint, y'all know it's name).

I was a chemistry student in a mostly technical (engineering) college.
Nobody in this college would dream of the kinds of blatant cheating I hear about at other places. Yes, people helping each other in their projects... imbalanced project teams with one brilliant student putting in most of the effort etc, that level of dubious behaviour was not uncommon (but not _too_ common either).

I got to play around with computers as my final year project. It was computational chemistry. I built a simulation model of a large number of molecules floating around under each other's forces and watch their emergent behaviour over simulated time. I'm rather proud of that project to this day.

And I was not alone by any means. A few of my batchmates' project work ended up in published papers (yes, our professors were expected to carry out international level research along with teaching). I interacted a bit with the computer science people too (since I was working on high performance compute clusters etc.). Some of the software I saw them build was impressive but I didn't know _how_ impressive at that stage in my life.

Later I switched fields and ended up doing a masters in computer science in a US university (picked up the under-graduate material through self-study and audited classes over a few years of pretending to do science research and TA'ing :-) )

Then I realized that the computer science students I came across back in my Indian college were doing some very impressive work for undergraduates.

So there. I hope it provides a reasonable counter-point to all the negative stuff about Indian students/colleges. My school is definitely not the common case... but it and many others like it do exist.
(I'm posting from a throw-away account for reasons best left unstated.)
ODesk is a scam. Please stay away from it.
I love the fact not only is it comic sans, but it's an entire image block, as if Comic Sans wouldn't render properly on everyone's machine, they created an image to make sure everyone enjoys the same Comic Sans experience.
> The arbitration firms should know full well who's feeding them. So stats aren't really necessary.

Yes, the incentives are perverse but empirical evidence is always necessary.
Hi. We're primarily .NET, HTML/js/css, SQL. Sorry, no ruby.
Is Amazon PIOPS Really Better than Standard EBS?